Obama inauguration inspires a million tweets

Twitter has revealed the extent of the impact the inauguration of Barack Obama had on the social media service yesterday, with over 1.1million messages posted in total.

This is in stark contrast to the number of tweets sent in 2008 when Obama first became President of The United States, with the initial inauguration commented on just 82,392 times. This is a total increase of 1335 per cent in total messages, a clear indicator of just how far the popularity of social media has risen in recent years. The busiest period saw 27,795 tweets being sent per minute, coinciding with Obama commenting:

This is another stark increase on the busiest point in 2008, which saw just 3,210 tweets being posted each minute.

American politics shows power of social media

This rapid Twitter activity is far from the first example of how the internet has been used successfully in American politics. The presidential campaign saw Obama answering questions on Reddit, while his "four more years" tweet broke records, with over 815,000 retweets and 304,000 favourites.

While the tweeting activity during this inauguration was well above the usual levels of tweets on a normal day, it was far removed from the incredible 20 million tweets sent during election evening in November.

Tom Glass, creative director at theEword commented: "Social media is an incredibly powerful tool in the modern era, and the popularity of Obama on websites such as Reddit and Twitter would certainly have helped to influence his success. I feel it is very likely that social media will be a key part of the political process around the world for the foreseeable future."